How To Quickly Unlock Local Administrator Account in Windows 8

There is this super power local admin account that can do almost anything on your computer without any restriction. But because of this super power, and due to the security reason, this account, simply called Administrator, is disabled by default in both Windows 7 and 8. To re-enable this account, you will basically need to go to Local Users and Groups in Computer Management, and uncheck the Account is disabled option (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Local administrator account property

But here is a much quick and easy way to lock and unlock this super power administrator account.

First of all, launch an elevated Command Prompt window, the one that has the administrator access. On Windows 8, you can do so by pressing Win+X, and choosing “Command Prompt (Admin)” from the list.

Then, run the following command to unlock the account.

net use administrator /active:yes

From this point on, you can use this super powerful administrator account to log into your computer, just like any other accounts. By default, there won’t be a password for it, so it will be a good idea to set one after you activated it or even before that.

To lock this account again, you can run the following command similar to the one above:

net use administrator /active:no

Now you may ask why I need to enable this account to expose the danger or what’s the benefit and difference compare to the normal account that has the local admin rights? One obvious benefit, for those who don’t like UAC, is that this local administrator account is not subject to User Account Control, meaning that Administrator can many any system changes without having to deal with UAC prompts.

Note that this trick only works on Windows 8 but not on Windows 7, unfortunately. For Windows 7, you will still have to go through the old way if you ever need to enable this local administrator account.